Mississippi ranks as the most religious while Vermont as the least religious, according to this new Gallop poll on the State of the States.   Read more

Want to see Muslim art in the United States? Until today, the two best museums to see that art were the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City and the Smithsonian Freer and Sackler Galleries in Washington, DC. Soon, you can also go to the Dallas Museum of Art whose recent agreement with a private art collector will instantly make it the the third largest repository of Muslim art in the United States. According to the New York Times,... Read more

What’s the controversy?  This Al Jazeera news clip sums it up nicely? Soda Stream, an Israeli company, located it’s factory in an Israeli occupied settlement, which many in the international community see as illegal.  Pro-Palestinian activists oppose the factory for that reason. What does Scarlett Johnasson have to do with the controversy?  The actress is a spokesperson for Oxam, but when she starred in the Soda Stream commercial, Oxfam criticized her. That’s because Oxfam, like much of the international community,... Read more

Studying Christianity?   Here’ an interesting clip about the Pentecostal movement and the challenges it poses to traditional Christian churches. Pentecostals number about 470 million and by 2025, they should grow to almost a quarter-billion. The movement has a strong messianic influence and focuses on speaking in tongues. You can read more about Pentecostalism at this excellent BBC religion site. And here is an interesting story about Pentecostal snake handlers. Read more

99 superheroes based on the 99 virtues of Allah. That’s the idea behind a comic book called The 99. The creator, Kuwaiti psychologist, Naif Al-Mutawa, wanted to provide Muslim kids with meaningful role models. But not everyone liked his comic book. When it was first released in 2006, some conservative Muslim leaders thought that he was rewriting the Quran and it was banned in Saudi Arabia. In 2010, PBS Independent Lens released a documentary about the comic book. That’s the... Read more

Studying contemporary Christianity?  Here’s a ten minute clip on the Emergent Church Movement which began seven or eight years ago.  According to the clip it began as result of the alarming drop-out rate of church goers in their 20’s and 30’s. You can read more about the Emergent Church here at PBS Read more

Bill Nye, the Science Guy, explains to the Huffington Post why he is an agnostic. Read more

What does religion mean to presidents? That’s what presidential historian, Michael Beschloss, tries to discern in this article for the Washington Post’s On Faith section. For some presidents, politics compels religion. Lyndon Johnson, for example, “flaunted his Protestant affiliation (Disciples of Christ) in order to attract voters to the Kennedy-Johnson ticket who were uneasy about JFK’s Catholicism.” Beschloss notes that Ronald Reagan “courted evangelical Christians, but had so little in common with them that he did not bother to go to... Read more

Studying Christianity and the Gospels?  Here’s a great documentary on the Gospels that did not make it into the New Testament–The so-called Lost Gospels. In  this engaging 2008 BBC Four documentary, Anglican priest, Pete Owen Jones, travels throughout Egypt and the old Roman Empire concentrating on the Gnostic texts found at Nag Hammadi. You can find the entire ninety minute documentary at the Gnostic Society Library here. Read more